OwensArtwork.com Gets Painted Anew

As a gift to my good friend and celebrated artist Matthew Owens, I offered to redesign his website. The previous iteration didn't reflect his sense of style or personality in the least. It felt like someone altogether different—a crafty homebody masquerading as the erudite, talented and slightly peculiar artist that many Chicagoans know and love.

Unfortunately, politics got in the way of launching the redesign and kept it in a holding pattern for the last year and a half. That is, until today. The new version of owensartwork.com launched with dark motifs of moody grays, painterly details, and a background scanned straight from a Jean Paul Gaultier shirt—nothing could be more Matthew than that.

Wanderlusting

I've never been a huge Bjork fan, but I am always impressed by the limitless, childlike creativity that shines through in everything she does. Her latest video, Wanderlust, is one of the most visually arresting experiences I've come across. Like walking into another person's lucid dream, Wanderlust is somewhat disturbing, highly ambiguous and completely overwhelming. The colors sizzle and the contours undulate as you travel through this amalgamation of Tibetan folklore and hallucination. This shouldn't be surprising. In the directors' words, the creative process "involved using psilocybin mushrooms…and going into nature in kind of a perturbed state."

Wanderlust, much like Bjork's early video for Human Behavior, evokes an intimate sense of place. Whether its stomping through a moonlit forest glen in the stomach of a life size teddy bear or careening down a river on the back of a Tibetan yak in the painterly Himalayan sunlight, you will certainly leave these videos with a sense of having experienced something profoundly unusual. You can view Wanderlust below, but I highly recommend watching the large format version here. And keep your eyes out for the 3D version to be released soon.

Kinetic Artwork

As a kid I had a fascination with the incredibly complex and always whimsical devices I would later come to know as Rube Goldberg Machines. Although in my youth I simply though of them as really cool ways to make breakfast (Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) or open your front gate (The Goonies). There is a great DIY aesthetic to the engineering of these devices that commands our attention no matter what age we are. And they remind us that the tangible world of physics, chemistry, engineering and sheer dumb luck still offer spectacles that computer graphics and super-slick art direction can't beat.

These are some of the more noteworthy Kinetic art pieces I've come across. Included are two works by Theo Jansen, a Dutch sculptor who creates large kinetic machines that can be set into motion by slight forces, such as a gust of wind or a gentle push.

The Way Things Go - Peter Fischli and David Weiss


Honda Ad

Theo Jansen - BMW Ad


Theo Jansen - Animaris Rhinoceros


Japanese Rube Goldberg Machines